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Soliciting novel ideas from the crowd is a paradigm shift for innovation that gains increasing attention from researchers and practitioners. However, studies examining the relationship between the novelty of crowdsourced ideas and firms' idea adoption decisions are surprisingly rare. This research adopts the path-of-least-resistance (POLR) theory as a new theoretical angle to examine the role of idea feasibility as a key heuristic cue mediating the effect of idea novelty on adoption decisions. We further explore factors that may amplify or mitigate this mediation. Using data collected from a laboratory experiment and a firm-sponsored crowdsourcing community, we reveal that firms tend to follow the POLR by using idea feasibility as meta-information to evaluate novel ideas in their idea adoption decisions. However, this tendency depends on external stimuli and constraints, such that the mediation of idea feasibility exists only when idea favorability from the crowd is low or when an ideator's prior ideation participation is high. Our supplementary study further offers preliminary insights on the extension of our proposed effects to the ultimate success of adopted ideas. These findings illuminate a better understanding of firms' idea adoption decisions and suggest ways to manage idea crowdsourcing effectively for new product/service development and improvements.

This study pertains to whether and how employees’ organizational citizenship behaviors toward customers (OCB-C) influence customers’ citizenship behaviors (CCB) directed toward the firm, employees, and other customers. Drawing on a social exchange perspective, this study proposes that a dual identification mechanism—spanning customer-employee identification (C-EI) and customer-firm identification (C-FI)—mediates the social exchange relationship between OCB toward customers (OCB-C) and CCB. Service climate as a key contextual factor moderates the mediating mechanisms of identification. With data collected from a field survey and an experiment, the findings confirm that the dual identification mechanism mediates the effect of OCB-C on customers’ reciprocation with CCB. The results also reveal a moderating effect of service climate, such that the positive effect of OCB-C on C-EI and C-FI grows stronger when the service climate is at low and high levels, respectively. In addition, the empirical results demonstrate that the underlying motive attribution explains the moderating effect of service climate. This work paints a more nuanced picture of the missing link in the OCB-C-CCB interface by identifying a mediating mechanism and boundary condition. To promote CCB, managers should leverage their employees’ OCB-C as well as their firms’ service climate.

Extant research confirms the importance of cocreating value with customers in service marketing, yet little is known about the impact of service agents’ work experiences on customers’ service perceptions. This research examines how service agents’ workplace ostracism from different sources (supervisors versus coworkers) influences customers’ perceived coproduction value, perceived service performance, and actual purchases. Three laboratory experiments and one survey reveal a double-edged sword effect of workplace ostracism and its contingency such that (1) supervisor ostracism reduces customers’ perceived control value in customer–agent coproduction through threatening service agents’ efficacy needs when the agents experience low servicing empowerment; (2) coworker ostracism enhances customers’ perceived relational value in coproduction through threatening service agents’ relational needs when they expect a long-term relationship with customers; and (3) customers’ perceived control and relational values increase their perceived service performance, and customer relational value also increases the amount of purchases. Our findings reveal that service agents’ workplace ostracism may actually help or harm customers’ service perceptions, depending on the source of ostracism. The results provide significant implications for how organizations can better manage employees’ perceived ostracism in the workplace and strategically improve customers’ experience in service coproduction with excluded agents.